By Angela Hartlin Along with the rest of the world, Canadians have been experiencing the devastations caused by the COVID-19 crisis. With access to effective treatments for trichotillomania (compulsive hair pulling), excoriation disorder (skin picking disorder), and other body-focused...
In the past, we’ve shared advice on how to navigate the holiday season for going to family gatherings with people who might not necessarily understand having a body-focused repetitive behaviour. Many of us have been in the position where...
Having a body-focused repetitive behaviour (BFRB) can be frustrating, making it tough to be kind to yourself and easy to fall into the cycle of being hard on yourself instead. There’s this idea that we should have the power...
Over the past several months, we’ve had to make a number of adjustments in the wake of the global pandemic that has put cities in lockdown and encouraged social distancing in very nearly all aspects of life. This has...
CBSN Does Mindfest 2020 Last week, the Canadian BFRB Support Network had the privilege of having a table at Mindfest, an annual mental health fair hosted at University of Toronto’s Hart House. Our greatest takeaway from this year’s...
One of the things I hate doing is going for dental visits. It’s not because I don’t take care of my teeth and gums or because I don’t want to be told I have a cavity (well, that is...
Hair tips from Kala Bennett. Kala is CBSN’s Outreach Coordinator and a trichster. Everyone who pulls their hair knows the horrors of finding bald spots, and the sheer terror that flows through your body when you realize “THIS IS...
Makeup tips from Danielle Roberts. Danielle is CBSN’s Peer Support Coordinator and a skin picker. I love makeup. Or rather, I should say that I have a Stockholm syndrome relationship with makeup. At 19, I was held hostage by...
A Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviour Awareness Week tradition here at CBSN is to gather guest blogs to share throughout the week. In the past, we’ve gotten a variety of narratives from BFRBers across the world. This week, we have four...
In the past, I’ve written about back-to-school tips I would recommend, but this time around, I thought I’d ask the body-focused repetitive behaviour (BFRB) community for their take on how to prepare for back-to-school. BFRBs are hard enough to...
In the body-focused repetitive behaviour community, many people who have a BFRB or multiple BFRBs are searching for a cure. And if not a cure specifically, all of us are looking for answers of some sort—causes, triggers, what helps,...
As a society, we tend to focus on getting on with it. Everyone is all about perseverance, and while I think yes, I will endure because I am who I am and its in my DNA, perseverance is not just...
Inspired by a blog on The Mighty about things the blogger wished she had been told about mental illness, I thought let’s delve into what we wished we had been told about body-focused repetitive behaviours (BFRBs), starting with dermatillomania....
It’s becoming more and more evident to me that there’s a stark divide between two different philosophies when it comes to body-focused repetitive behaviours. One the one side of things, we have community members who strive to be behaviour-free....
This guest blog was written by Tasneem Abrahams, a CBT therapist who treats BFRB clients, mainly with skin excoriation disorder and trichotillomania. Cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to have the most effective results for helping people with BFRBs...